A Far Out Fantastic Site

No, the headline to this post is not a tabloid. This is not rag or sensationalist journalism. Even though mulit-award-winning author Harlan Ellison passed away six years ago, an anthology edited by him is posthumously coming out very soon. I’ve read all of Ellison’s anthology of dark and disturbing science fiction, "Dangerous Visions", and almost ever since his final and third book in the “Dangerous Visions” trilogy was announced as a Patreon-backed project in 2020 , I had been looking for my used paperback copy of the second volume, "Again, Dangerous Visions". I knew it sat buried, untouched and unread by yours truly among many other books of science fiction, horror and other genres, somewhere in my bedroom closet.  It was only a little over a week ago that I finally found it, and it wasn’t as buried away in my closet as much as I had thought. After opening coffins and treasure chests of books and not finding it, I found it stashed away behind a row of several oth...

  It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) blog hop ! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. I normally do the optional question for the month which this month’s is Do you use AI in your writing and if so how? Do you use it for your posts? Incorporate it into your stories? Use it for research? Audio? However, because it covers a topic I've gone over several times both in past IWSGs and in weekly posts, I couldn’t think of anything else to say about AI in time for today’s post. So, I’ll just give the short answer: I absolutely do not use generative AI, and any other type of Artificial Intelligence I do use is probably so imbedded in tools such as text editors’ spell checks that I don’t really think about it.  Here are some of the past posts where I cover the topic of AI:  https://faroutfantastic.blogspot.com...

Credit: Pixabay This is the weekend that we usually have our Book-To-Movie review, but I'm postponing it until next weekend. I was spending all day yesterday racking by brain dead while doing my state sales and use tax return, which in California is due at the beginning of each fiscal year. So, I was worn out totally by the evening. I couldn't keep focused or even awake to work on the current story in progress for my upcoming short fiction collection, "Bad Apps". So, I've been working on it this evening to make up for the lost time. However, I didn't want to leave you without a blog post this weekend since last weekend’s already got delayed to the middle of the week (too long of a delay for a weekly blog). So, I wanted to do at least a short post for this week, one that will tell you how you can get a free, pre-release edition of "Bad Apps"! And you can do that by being a volunteer beta reader! How You Can Volunteer as a Beta Reader for ‘Bad Apps’ ...